KINDER'S COMMENTARY: RESOLUTION OPPOSES EPA's UNREALISTIC CLEAN AIR STANDARDS

This Thursday (Jan. 30) at 8:30 a.m., the Senate Lounge in your State Capitol will be the site of a hearing on a resolution that opposes new clean air standards proposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The Senate Rules Committee will hear Senate Concurrent Resolution 12, offered by this writer and five colleagues, which asks the EPA to back down from its proposed new National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for ozone and particulate matter (PM). If passed, the resolution would communicate to the EPA and to our elected representatives in Washington, D.C., that the Missouri General Assembly wants the new rules stopped dead in their tracks.

We will be there with witnesses from all walks of life. We will be there with representatives of the charcoal plants of the southern Missouri Ozarks, now targeted for extinction, and their group, the Missouri Forest Products Association. Like others in business, these hardworking folks, demonized by extreme environmentalists, ask nothing more of government than that they be left alone to hire and work and produce as they have for decades. We will be there with representatives from small business (the National Federation of Independent Business), big business (utilities and Big Three auto makers), in-between business, dry cleaners, body-and-fender shops, painters, sheet metal contractors, ordinary folks from all walks of life. For thousands of ordinary business people are awakening to the fact that their very freedom as Americans is threatened in the drastic overreaching by the pitiless environmental zealots at the EPA.

We'll be there to remind the committee that the EPA's own scientific advisory committee said harsh new rules of this nature are unwarranted.

None of these NAAQS opponents will be asking to turn back the clock on clean air progress made over the past two generations. All will be arguing, however, that it is past time to inject some calculation of cost into the equation, and to weigh them against the alleged, and largely illusory, benefits of the new rules. Gee. Imagine that.

Our dear friends at the Sierra Club, who paid this writer the tribute of spending money for a series of radio ads targeting me in last fall's campaign, have weighed in. They are repeating (to paraphrase) that green grass will never grow on my grave, such are my offenses against the environment, old folks and children with asthma. Here's hoping their efforts prove as effective this week as they did in the battle for the minds of the voters of the 27th Senate District.

At the next First Friday Coffee of the Cape Girardeau Chamber of Commerce (Feb. 7 at 7:30 a.m. at the Show Me Center), we will have some of these industry experts here to apprise our local folks of the issues at stake and how you can influence the process. The EPA's comment period on these proposed new rules is under way and, unless extended, will expire Feb. 18.

The battle, then, is joined between those of us clean air supporters who are ready to stand and fight arrogant overreaching at the EPA, and those on the other side for whom this is just another tightening of the thumbscrews they have planned for every freedom-loving American. We're hoping to awaken Missourians to the fact that this is the very sort of issue -- the arbitrary power of the king -- over which our forefathers fought a revolution some 220 years ago. We'll keep you posted.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.